


The Artist

by Lochinvar



Series: Talismen [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Academia, Acts of Kindness, Adepts, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Dean Winchester, BAMF Sam Winchester, Books, Chicago (City), Children, Comfort Food, Cursed objects, Curses, Dark Magic, Dean is Awesome, Dog-Lover Sam Winchester, Female Protagonist, Fluff and Angst, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Gen, Happy Dean Winchester, Happy Sam Winchester, Hunters & Hunting, Impala, Jesuits, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Kid Dean Winchester, Kid Sam Winchester, Library, Magic, Men of Letters, Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, Motherly love, POV Outsider, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Priests, Protective Dean Winchester, Protectiveness, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sam is awesome, Sigils, Spells & Enchantments, Summer, Summer School, Talismen, University, University of Chicago, Weechesters, Young Dean Winchester, Young Sam Winchester, sammy winchester - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-06 07:23:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 17,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15881325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lochinvar/pseuds/Lochinvar
Summary: Esther Sabin, an art student with a stellar future ahead of her, gives it up to become the wife and political support for her husband, Dr. Lukas Mitkus, and his career as a world-famous anthropologist at the University of Chicago. She becomes Dottie Mitkus: volunteer, faculty wife, and fundraiser. She is cocooned in happiness for 14 years, until a taciturn man, part of a mysterious group known as Hunters, abandons his two little boys with her and Dr. Mitkus for an idyllic summer. Her life is changed forever.Own nothing; rely on the kindness of strangers.Kudos and comments appreciated - thank you.





	1. Meet Dottie Mitkus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [compo67](https://archiveofourown.org/users/compo67/gifts).



> This is part of the series regarding the civilians who helped Dean and Sam Winchester survive when they were children. Some were part of an unofficial network called Talismen, much like the Underground in World War II. If you like this story you might like The Bear, The Wish Book, and Paying It Forward.
> 
> I am determined to give the boys some happiness.
> 
> The star of this production is based on two real women artists, former roommates of mine, and many of the scenes are idealized versions of my childhood in Chicago. But I took liberties. 
> 
> The boys arrive in Chapter Three, if you are not a fan of fiction that relies on original characters I won't be upset if you skip ahead.
> 
> This work is dedicated to Compo67 and their endless entertaining pieces about the boys set in Chicago.
> 
> It is a finished work; will be posting intermittently over the next several days.

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. - _William Morris_

\------

Esther Sabin was an artist– _Print, Fabric, Costume, and Decorative Arts–_ immersed in an interdisciplinary arts and crafts major at the prestigious University of Chicago (UC). Life was good.

When friends described Esther, they inevitably used the word “exotic”. Dark brown eyes slightly slanted and almond-shaped, high cheekbones, fair skin, and a mane of thick, dark brown hair that she wove into a complex French braid every morning. At Halloween, she would transform herself into a gypsy princess. Bold colors suited her.

She always won first place.

Esther was devoted to her art, with plans to open her own multimedia craft studio after graduation. But then she surprised her college friends with the announcement that she was going to marry at the end of her senior year and transform herself into Dottie Mitkus, symbolically adopting a childhood nickname along with her husband-to-be’s last name and leaving behind her own lauded art school successes to support her spouse’s professional advancement. She would become that creature of legend: a faculty wife.

And her husband’s recent inheritance would give her the money and time to indulge herself in her avocation even as she helped promote her husband’s career full time.

They were going to be a team, she said, sitting next to her brilliant, kind, gorgeous husband-to-be at her department’s impromptu engagement party. She would be marrying the scholar Lukas Mitkus, a Lithuanian-American native of the South Side’s Marquette Park neighborhood and a rising star at UC’s Anthropology department; he was an expert in all things obscure in linguistics and early religions.

\-----

They made a striking couple. Lukas was tall, blond, and slender, with startling blue eyes. He looked a little, if you squinted, like Paul Henreid in the movie _Casablanca:_ the brave, saintly Viktor Laszlo.

Esther met Lukas the first day of her first semester of college, as she was running down the broad green sloping lawn called the Midway, heading towards her freshman orientation meeting. He called out to her as if he knew her. She stopped, and they talked. She couldn’t explain why he yelled or why she stopped; she didn’t remember what they talked about.

But she was very late for orientation.

They dated discreetly, off-campus, and, by her sophomore year, she had moved into his nearby apartment. He asked her to marry him at the end of her junior year.

In the university’s microcosm (90 Nobel Laureates and counting) Lukas was perched in the upper levels of the pantheon. He also was sweet, with Victorian-era manners, as if he has been born and raised in an earlier century. He was a secular Catholic who spoke of God and Jesus as if they were old friends of the family who he had coffee and kringle with on Thursdays. And he was a spiritual man, influenced by his studies and respect for world religions and devout practices.

And full of surprises. He worked out regularly, but he chose martial arts over tennis or bicycling and was an active member of the Fencing Club. Under his conservative attire Bruce Lee-grade muscles layered his lanky frame. He vanished twice a week to a mysterious downtown Chicago location, which he finally admitted was a gun club with an indoor firing range.

Lukas also had some unusual scars, which precipitated a disconcerting conversation the night of their first sleepover before so much as a shoe had been discarded. He said they were remnants of a mugging when he was a kid and side effects of his enthusiasm for the combat arts. And only then did he undress with the lights on. Since that night, Esther would be kissing those scars many times.

\-----

Esther’s immigrant Polish mother, Rose Sabin, her only living relative, claimed she would have been proud of Dr. Mitkus and happy for her totally besotted daughter if he hadn’t been Catholic, even though she had little patience for organized religion. (She called the rules for maintaining a kosher household “barbaric superstitions”.)

And he was Lithuanian, which, to her old-country mind, meant a snake-worshipping pagan who spoke a weird tongue unrelated to the honest, hard-working Slavic languages like Polish, Russian, or her native Germanic Yiddish.

Both mothers threatened to boycott the secular wedding that the couple had planned for the world-famous Rockefeller Chapel–a perk of being an official part of the University of Chicago community. So, Esther and Lukas eloped. When Esther Sabin returned as Dottie Mitkus, she and her mother had nothing much to say to each other for the next ten years.

\------

The problem, Lukas would come to realize, was that Esther/Dottie always was and always would be an artist. And artists are a curious species, with an eye for details, and they are never satisfied. Endless questions about scars and gun clubs and a body that looked more like a weapon than a vessel for someone immersed in the details of ancient tombs.


	2. The Hunters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dottie and Lukas had a happy life...but who are those strange people who keep calling on her scholarly husband? What dangers lurk in the library? And why is her husband lying to her?

There is no limit to what people can do or where they can go if they don’t mind who gets the credit.

\------

After a couple of years of hosting faculty teas and charming senior department members, Dottie began to notice that husband Lukas had visitors who were obviously not the typical academic colleagues. Mostly men. There always was a sense of drama to their visits. She called them the Strangers.

Some Strangers sat against the far wall in the back of Lukas’s classroom, barely looking up, always scribbling notes regardless of the topic. They never interacted with the students or the other professors, only Lukas.

Academics, Dottie noted, were interested in the big picture: _What_ and _Why_. But these visitors had pragmatic questions about artifacts, spirits, legends, and oral traditions: the _How_ of identifying the subcategories of djinn and casting spells in languages that had not be spoken out loud for centuries.

Some saw Lukas only at his campus office. But, once he and Dottie were settled in their co-op (and how did he afford this expensive dwelling to share with his new bride, even with his inheritance?), the Strangers visited them after hours and brought books to have translated or codes to decipher; others carried objects wrapped in softened sheets of parchment covered in sigils drawn in iron gall ink, which Dottie recognized from her art history classes.

The sigils were similar to those carved and etched on every surface of their co-op’s impressive home office and library, the largest room in their spacious home. The one with the heavy iron locks on the massive oak doors.

And over the doors and windows of every other room.

Sometimes the Strangers lugged in lead-lined iron boxes, also covered in what she came to recognize as those same symbols. When she asked Lukas what they were, his answers were vague.

When she tried to take photographs to study, the film was overexposed, as if the images were radiating at an invisible frequency. So, she drew the images, often from memory, instinctively using the same kind of parchment and iron gall ink in which she had seen the Strangers wrap their artifacts. She ignored how the images seemed to vibrate and move on the page. Never showed Lukas what she was doing.

She could have secrets, too.

They were called wardings, she learned from her own research in the University’s giant library; she did not tell Lukas what she was studying. They protected people and property.

Protection from what, she wondered?

Sometimes, hands trembling, the Strangers dropped off ancient books, handling them as if they were packages containing weapons of mass destruction, which the wrong look could trigger.

Years later Dottie learned the truth; the Strangers were right to be afraid.

Their aliases, to be honest, were laughable. One week seven men named Smith showed up independently, ranging from a fuzz-faced teenager from Quebec who barely spoke English, looking for information about urban _Loup Garou_ s, to an elderly man who dressed like an English lord from the 19th century and spoke the Appalachian dialect of eastern Kentucky. He left a wooden box with a six-pointed star crudely burned into the lid. The box was wrapped in finely wrought iron chains and a locking device with no discernable hole for a key.

The elegant Stranger kissed the back of Dottie’s hand before he departed.

Lukas would not let her touch the box.

Some of the Strangers were equipped with the very latest electronic mobile devices, which they consulted frequently. Others balanced battered and stained military-grade duffel bags on their shoulders, stuffed with old notebooks and paper files.

And weapons. Over the years Dottie glimpsed machetes, rifles, broadswords, a portable flamethrower, an assortment of knives and guns, and glass vials etched with sigils and filled with liquids and powders that seemed to glow in the dark.

A few of the men and women who visited were well-spoken professionals in dark suits with bulges under their jackets and legitimate-looking law enforcement badges; others, even the women, looked (and smelled) liked duck hunters who had spend the first week of open season in a blind at the edge of a freshwater swamp. The clothes were marked with blood stains too old to bleach away, like a well-used butcher’s apron.

Lukas was evasive when Dottie asked question, saying he was trying to protect the privacy of the people who came to see him. Dottie pointed out that he was not a doctor or a priest (at least, he never actually entered the seminary although he had had a “calling” before they met, or so he told her). He was just, she said with affectionate sarcasm, a mild-mannered professor of curses and fairy tales.

Dottie was relentless with her interrogations, as every year the Strangers seemed to take up more of her husband’s spare time.

Lukas finally gave up keeping Dottie in the dark, at least about this part of his life. He explained that the visitors were members of a loose-knit network of earnest conspiracy theorists who called themselves Hunters.

Yes, they include law enforcement officials and some genuine scholars, but mostly they are lonely men and women, Lukas said, many veterans of the last three generations of wars. They earnestly believe that the myths of the world’s cultures are true, that demons and vampires and revengeful ghosts are as real as their next door neighbors, and that it is their job to find the monsters that prey on humans and to destroy them. They keep in touch with each other via secret meetings and coded cellphone messages. Many are constantly on the move, living off military pensions and disability checks.

Lukas reassured Dottie several times that, although suffering from shared delusions, the self-styled Hunters were harmless, and their knowledge of mythology and tribal rites impeccable.

During meetings at their home, the door to the office and library often would be closed and locked. The heavy oak was soundproofed, something Lukas had installed, he said, so late night discussions would not disturb her.

She was instructed to knock twice with the heavy iron knocker, wait a minute, and knock twice again. Lukas would unlock the door. If she had food and drink, she was to put the tray on the sideboard, leave, and close the door behind her.

Sometimes, the door was locked, and no one would answer. She would return the food to the kitchen and eventually go to sleep alone. Never heard the guests leave.

\-----

Lukas had been an active Hunter. Now he was a Talismen, supporting those who risked their lives in the front lines in the unending war against evil. He also was an Adept-in-Training, whose skills with spells and potions might someday match those of the legendary Pastor James Murphy of Blue Earth, Minnesota.

He didn’t tell Dottie that he knew damn well the Hunters were telling the truth, the whole truth, because he had seen the monsters with his own eyes, spoken the rituals, made the sacrifices, killed his share in battle, and that his scholarship in the legends of a dozen extinct civilizations was tested in lamb’s blood, burning holy oil, and blessed silver. And those scars on his body were not from a childhood misadventure or a slipup in a martial arts studio.

Lukas also didn’t tell her that those matching tattoos he had talked her into getting one night after pouring her shots of creamy, homemade Lithuanian milk liqueur (his mother Irena’s recipe) would protect her against most of what snarls and drools in the night. (He never thought that she would research the symbol herself.)

He hoped to keep her safe by keeping her ignorant, defending her from the Things that preyed on human flesh and souls and slept uneasily in his unholy collection of books.

His plan was to keep his other life a secret. It worked for fourteen years. The problem? Artists never stop exploring. Never stop asking.


	3. The Winchesters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dottie meets John and his boys

I taught you to fight and to fly. What more could there be?” ―  _J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy_

It was early summer, but giant dahlia-flowered zinnias were already on fire in the raised flowerbed against the south wall of their Chicago cooperative’s building. Dottie had nurtured the blooms from seedlings that she had coaxed to life during the Windy City’s icy wet spring and transplanted once the summer heat had settled in.

John Winchester was one of the regular visitors. He had been showing up for five years, just before the summer solstice. The Hunter would spend a week in her husband’s office and library, sleeping on the couch or in the guest room between long sessions of research and talk, fueled by coffee and sandwiches.

Once he had been handsome, Dottie assumed,tall and broad-shouldered, always smiling. She knew him only as the man whose eyes were shattered by irreversible grief, a look she had seen in the faces of several of the visiting Hunters. She vaguely knew of his history–a young wife, killed or murdered. Lukas said he was not sure. Vietnam vet, ex-Marine. Drinking issues. Two kids somewhere.

Dottie had returned from campus where she had been attending a meeting with the University’s development office staff about a fundraiser for the undergraduate library. She was in demand because of her artisan genius, and she had agreed to sew a book-themed quilt for their auction.

Lukas left a note on the dining room table. Mr. Winchester again had arrived  to take up residence in the library. Dottie fixed a snack for the two men and followed the ritual as prescribed by her husband. She knocked and waited, knocked again and entered with black coffee and her homemade apple muffins. Cooking had become another manifestation of her artist’s soul, and she baked as well as she sewed and painted.

The sun was just setting, and she needed to know their plans for dinner.

Mr. Winchester and her husband already had piled up dozens of books on the big oak worktable.

The archivist who assisted Lukas from time to time, Father Kaufmann, an austere Jesuit from Loyola University, would be coming the next day to help search and shelve. The tall priest, who was built like a professional football linebacker, barely acknowledged Dottie’s presence ever since that one time she tried to help. He literally grabbed her wrist when she reached over the table to move a book that was in danger of falling on the floor.

“Do. Not. Touch,” Father Kaufmann hissed at her.

At the time, Lukas shook his head and asked her to leave. Dottie slept in the guest room for a week until he apologized. He told her that some of the books had been treated with chemicals that might cause an allergic reaction and that although Father Kaufmann did not have good people skills, he meant well.

Another unsatisfactory answer.

After that, Father Kaufmann and Dottie mostly ignored each other.

The Hunter, dressed in boots, worn jeans, and a flannel work shirt, was copying passages by hand into a journal. Her husband was reading out loud from a different book.

A movement caught her eye, and she turned, momentarily stunned.

She had not realized that Mr. Winchester had brought his children on this visit. The Hunter was in a hurry and having them with him saved him a trip back to a motel and the cost of late checkout, Lukas told her later. They won’t be a problem, Mr. Winchester had told her husband, but both men apparently forgot to tell her that there were two more visitors who required food and a place to sleep.

Two little boys, about six and ten, sat huddled on the couch, dressed in ill-fitting, second-hand clothing, too thin for the university’s neighborhood, where Lake Michigan breezes could drop the temperature by 20 degrees before nightfall. She was sure they had been told not to touch anything.

Dottie did not know much about kids, except she knew that they probably need food and warmer clothing.

When she asked their father’s permission to get the boys something to eat, he waved his hand in dismissal, never looking up from his writing.

She motioned to the boys. The older boy looked at his father, who was absorbed in his writing. He jumped off the couch, took his brother’s hand, and helped him down.

She led the children out of the library, closing the door behind her, and down the hall into their efficient, dime-sized kitchen. The older boy helped his smaller brother hop up, and they both slid, side by side, onto the bench next to the tiny breakfast table. While she heated a can of tomato rice soup, they split a microwaved plate of dinner leftovers from the night before–chicken and steamed vegetables–and inhaled two of the apple muffins with butter and jam. She served them milk in small coffee cups with handles, better suited for little hands than big drinking glasses.

The bigger brother didn’t begin to eat his share until he was satisfied that his smaller brother would have enough.

Half way through the meal, the little Winchester, the boy with the hazel eyes and killer dimples, toppled over and fell asleep, his head in his brother’s lap. His older brother, green-eyed and freckled, put a protective arm around the sleeping child.

He sipped the soup slowly, spoonful by spoonful, watching Dottie like a mother bear watches tourists snapping photos of her cub. She looked at his thin, pale face, put the remaining muffins, each wrapped in a paper napkin, inside a cloth grocery bag, and added apples, crackers, and several cans of vegetable soup.

The little one still was asleep. She left the bulging bag on the kitchen table and held out her hands to the boy and his sleeping brother. Very slowly, the older boy moved his arm, and the woman leaned forward and gently lifted the younger brother, cuddling him against her body. She walked into the master bedroom, the older brother following closely.

The bedroom was an oasis of peace and comfort, a tribute to Dottie’s skill with needle and loom. The floor was sheathed with planks of warm spice maple and covered with thick woven rag rugs in aquatic blues and greens. A quilted bedspread with seasonal appliques of spring flowers and pale green leaves covered the bed. Lined drapes of sage green and pale yellow stood guard against the chill of the night wind from nearby Lake Michigan and would keep the room cool in the mid-day heat of summer. A jumble of nature-themed art on the walls made it feel like the sanctuary of a woodlands godling.

A fresh bouquet of red zinnias on a small table shouted in celebration.

Dottie placed the sleeping boy on the big bed on top of the quilt. Under his head she folded a big, floppy, down pillow, which she pulled from beneath the bedspread. She removed his shoes and pulled a feather-soft, plush blanket, the same pale yellow as the drapes, from the foot of the bed and floated it over him, rather than risk waking him up by turning down the bed or removing his clothes.

Meanwhile, the older brother pulled himself up on the bed and crawled next to the smaller boy. He silently handed the woman his shoes, scooted his body under the yellow blanket, wrapped his arm around his little brother, and put his head on the down pillow next to his, watching her the whole time. She nodded and smiled, and he closed his eyes.

She looked at them for a moment, before turning out the lamp next to the bed, but she left the door cracked open, so the light in the hallways dimly illuminated the room.

Dottie walked back into the library. Knocked and waited, knocked, and entered. She thought it was right to give Mr. Winchester a report. What the boys ate, and the fact they were safely sleeping under a warm, clean blanket. Her husband and the Hunter were lost in conversation and ignored her. She doubted that Mr. Winchester was aware that his boys were gone. Experience taught her that the men would carry their conversation late into the night and beyond. And in the case of Mr. Winchester’s visits with her husband, they would be running on coffee, muffins, and sandwiches as long as he was in town.

She stood for a while, but they were deeply immersed in a discussion of demonology. Occasionally, Mr. Winchester took a swig from a flask.

She left and, once again, closed the heavy oak door.

Dottie went back to the kitchen, sat down, and stared at nothing. And thought about her mother for the first time in a long time–Rose Sabin, who had shown up in the United States with a baby, and no husband, and had struggled to raise her alone.


	4. The Hospital

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dottie remembers an incident from her childhood, which is going to have a big impact on the Winchesters and her marriage.

Mothers are all slightly insane. _J. D. Salinger_

What gives us the courage and strength to do what must be done? For an English assignment in high school, the teacher asked Dottie’s class to write a story about something that inspired them to be their best selves. Some of the students wrote about the fictional characters in books and movies that had made them want to improve.  
  
But others had real stories to share. The father who stood up to the Chicago political machine and won. The next-door neighbor who survived the Holocaust and managed to stay a kind and hopeful woman, even after all she had seen. The boyfriend who pulled an injured woman from a burning car, knowing it was going to explode at any moment. The legendary cousin who defied her family as a teenager and enlisted to drive an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War.

This was the story that Dottie recorded, the one she thought about as she sat in her silent kitchen.

When she was eleven years old, Dottie fell on her way home from school at lunchtime. The injury was a greenstick break, angled at 45 degrees, and her arm needed to be bent back into shape and wrapped in a plaster cast. She and her mother waited for seven hours in the emergency room of the nearby hospital. The girl had not eaten since breakfast, and by the time the right bone doctor showed up, it was past 7 pm.

This happened during a time when fatal reactions to general anesthetics were much more common, and the doctor asked her mother if they could perform the procedure with local injections of painkillers and muscle relaxants. Mrs. Sabin agreed, obedient to authority, holding her daughter’s hand tightly.

They strapped young Dottie to a hospital gurney, gave her a shot of a muscle relaxant that did nothing to ease the pain of the injury or calm her, and found a plump nurse for her to hold and to hold on to her in return.

They were not mean men, but it was late, and they wanted to get home to their own families. So they cut some corners.

Dottie buried her face in the woman’s round body. She could tell the nurse was furious with the doctors, who were treating the procedure as a way to show off their skills. They were like boys leaning in to fiddle with the engine of their favorite car, wrenches in hand.

Working as a team, the doctors bent her arm back into shape–straightening the break while using an x-ray of the injury as a guide. She lay still, rigid with fear, She could hear the bone creak; the pain was excruciating. The nurse tried to comfort her. Told her to hold tight. Told her she could cry, it was okay. But she would not cry. She did not want to embarrass her mother in front of the doctors. Did not want them to think less of her mother. She could be strong. Only one whimper when the pain was too much.

Dottie was wheeled into a semi-private hospital room. Two strong orderlies unstrapped her from the gurney and moved her to the bed, and the plump nurse began to wrap her arm in cloth and wet plaster around a splint. The doctors appeared with her mother. Dottie's arm still hurt and by this time, her stomach was hurting as well from hunger.

They were going to hold her overnight for observation. She still did not cry.

Rose asked her in a mix of Yiddish and English how she was. Dottie was horrified to see tears leak from her mother’s eyes. Her mother never cried.

“What do you want, duckie,” her mother asked her. “Anything you want. Anything.”

“Anything?”

Her mother nodded.

“Can I have chicken soup?”

Her mother nodded again.

“And… can I have a corned beef sandwich?”

Her mother turned to the team of doctors.

"My daughter wants a bowl of chicken soup and a corned beef sandwich,’ Rose said, not a difficult request in a hospital whose patients and staff mostly were drawn from a nearby middle-class Jewish neighborhood.

She spoke as if reciting a statement of fact, not a question or request.

“I’m sorry,” said one of the doctors, “but the hospital kitchen is closed.”

Rose took a step towards the doctors. She straightened up, lifted her chin. The look on her face stopped her daughter’s breath. It also had an effect on the doctors, who visibly shrank and stepped back as one entity. They were no longer privileged or important. They were reduced to puny men, who were about to be crushed under the wrath of a mother. God could not help them.

She repeated the request when the doctors did not respond, slowing down the words. There was no emotion, just words.

“My daughter is hungry. She wants a bowl of chicken soup and a corned beef sandwich,” Rose Sabin said.

Her accent lay thick in the room. Perhaps their mothers and grandmothers, from Mexico and Romania and Denmark and South Korea, had spoken the same way to a customs official, a school teacher, a police officer, a border guard, a priest, a rabbi, a bureaucrat–someone in authority who did not intend to be cruel, but stood in the way of something their children needed. Deserved.

Grownup Dottie was not clear what happened next to little Dottie. Coming down from the adrenaline high of the drama of the evening, of the procedure, of her mother’s confrontation with the doctors, or perhaps from the impact of the drugs, she must have dozed for a few minutes. She woke up to the heavenly odor emanating from a large white bowl of steaming soup, thick with noodles, carrots, and pieces of chicken, resting on the small wooden table by her hospital bed. A sturdy metal spoon waited on top of a folded cloth napkin. Next to the soup bowl on a matching dinner plate sat a monumental corned beef sandwich on rye. The bread was smeared with yellow mustard and cut into quarters, with the obligatory spear of kosher dill pickle. Dottie’s favorite meal.

Rose perched on the edge of the bed and fed her the soup a spoonful at a time as if she was a little girl again. Her mother handed her the sandwich in pieces. She wiped her baby girl’s hands and face with a wet washcloth, pulled the blankets up to her neck when she was finished, kissed her goodnight, turned off the light, and left with the plump nurse, who had stayed past her shift to make sure that Dottie was okay.  
  
"When I think of my mother, I feel brave," wrote Dottie at the end of the piece. When she read it out loud, her classmates applauded.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pretty much happened this way to the real Dottie and Rose. Was a really good bowl of soup and sandwich as I recall.


	5. Summer Vacation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While the boys ate and ate and ate, Dottie was noticing more puzzling details regarding their home and spending more time at the University library.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My obligatory chapter where Sam and Dean eat. Let's put some meat on those skinny little boy bones.

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.  _Anton Chekhov_

Grown-up Dottie walked back to the library door. Without knocking, she opened it and went in. She stood and looked at the two men. Her sweet, absent-minded husband was suddenly the enemy, as was the Hunter. She did not care how smart or deadly these men were.

Details. After four years of courtship and ten years of marriage, her head was filled with details. Seeing the boys and remembering the hospital incident cracked opened a window in her mind, just an inch or two, like letting fresh air into a room while a storm raged outside. But, first things first.

She thought of the bag of food in the kitchen and realized that it wasn’t enough. Suddenly, as if she was possessed, she spoke. It was not her voice; she channeled her mother Rose, who had told the best orthopedic surgical team in Chicago to find her daughter chicken soup and a sandwich. Now.

“Your boys are tired, cold, and hungry. They are staying here as long as it takes for them to be rested, warm, and fed. I will decide when they leave with you. You two can choose who sleeps in the guest room or on the couch,” she said.

She looked at her husband.

“The boys and I will be in the master bedroom. Feed yourselves.”

The men looked up in tandem, seeing her for the first time. Dottie left, proud that she closed the door to the library without slamming it.

\------

Dottie napped in a chair next to the bed, attuned to the boys’ breathing. The brothers slept through the night until mid-morning, the older one waking once from a nightmare. She fetched him a drink of water, wiped the tears from his face with a damp cloth, and slipped him back under the blanket.

Lukas gave Mr. Winchester the guest room, and he took the couch in the library. As early as Dottie got up to make breakfast and set things right with her husband, their visitor was gone. He left a short note, thanking her for taking in the boys, a duffle bag filled with a few old clothes, and nothing else.

Better for them, he had written. Will be back in a week. Please don’t call Social Services. Their names are Sammy and Dean.

It was three months before she saw him again.

In the coming weeks Mr. Winchester contacted Lukas four times.

“How are my boys?” the father would ask the professor. Lukas would say the boys were fine. And then the real conversation would commence regarding monsters and the Fate of the World.

No room for…”How are my boys? How are Sammy and Dean? Are they well? Are they eating? Are they happy? Do they miss me? Are you tucking them in at night? Do you sing them _Hey Jude_? Do you read them stories about angels? Do you kiss them goodnight? Do they take naps? Do you feed them mac and cheese? It is their favorite, you know. Are they making friends? Is Sammy shy? Does Sammy have a dog to play with? He loves dogs. Do you take them to the museum that has the submarine? Dean loves engines and machines. I miss them so much. Hate being away so long. Are they there now? I want to hear their voices now. Put them on the phone now. I need to tell them that I love them now.”

The boys were introduced as Lukas’s nephews who were spending the summer.

Dottie had a new job, which is what she told the academic community as she backed out of her role as university princess and turned her attention into becoming a world-class aunt. She diligently applied her intelligence, energy, and taste, as usual.

She told her friends she didn’t feel like a parental figure so much as the nanny who slept with the head of the household. Her friends laughed and made light of her new duties.

Meanwhile, Dottie ignored the blossoming love that was transforming her from the inside out.

By the end of her first week with the brothers Dottie had traded in her designer dresses and stylish suits for an artist’s worn jeans and work shirts. Wiped off the eye make-up, locked up her jewelry, and stopped going to luncheons and fund-raising meetings. Quit her committees. Actually, rarely visited the campus except for those places where the children could play. And the University library.

Cut off her hair, leaving a messy crop of dark brown curls; couldn’t take the time for the French braid.

Lukas mostly watched from the sidelines, but stepped up when it involved “Hunter” issues. The first day, Dottie overheard Dean take Lukas aside and ask the scholar to show him how the co-op was warded. She followed along as Lukas pretended, for her sake, that he was merely pointing out art pieces, as if their home was a gallery.

Dottie began to realize how many of the images on the walls of their co-op she had taken for granted: the carvings on the doors, the artifacts on the tables, even the fabric on the furniture. Most contained protection symbols from dozens of cultures. That window in her mind opened another inch. More details. More research.

Ten-year-old Dean and 42-year-old Dr. Mitkus shared a strong bond: keeping the ones they loved–Sammy and Dottie­–oblivious to what the Hunter’s son and the professor knew to be the Real World. After that first day, they talked behind the oak door of the library.

Lukas slept on the couch in his library while she took the guest room; Dottie had told him she needed some space. She still was bothered by what she thought was her husband’s indifference to the boys’ neglect, but something else changed, was changing. They still kissed and touched, but the brothers’ presence inhibited her.

When she looked at her husband, she would cock her head and squint slightly, as she did when she was studying another artist’s handiwork. Or when she was trying to decide if a plant in her garden was a seedling or a weed.

\-----

She gave the boys the master suite with the awesome bathroom and asked them to pick their favorites from the quilts and spreads buried in the storage chest in her workroom. The room became more summery, messier, with toys and clothes piled on the floor.

Six-year-old Sammy was sweet and, as Lukas and Dottie quickly discovered, as smart as they come. Devoured books like popcorn and was already reading what the public librarians called juvenile fiction and chapter books. Chattered away about everything. Adored his big brother, who was the sun and moon and the stars. Loved hugs and cuddles. Could not spend enough time in the park and loved dogs and trips to the zoo. Had two and three helpings of everything, once he realized it was not just allowed but encouraged.

Dean was quiet at first, with a chip on his shoulder when it came to anything that had to do with his younger brother, but his rare smile could light up Chicago’s iconic Merchandise Mart. Had several private conversations with Lukas before he let Dottie give Sammy baths, help dress him in the morning, or fix his meals. Was, as Dottie said to a friend at their favorite playground, 10 going on 35. Was physically superior in speed and strength to children twice his size and had the vibes of a natural leader. Loved to cook. Could not spend enough time at the beach. Had three and four helpings of everything, once he realized it was not just allowed but encouraged.

\------

She guessed the boys rarely had owned anything first-hand. She bought them new clothing, even though neighbors and friends had offered very nice hand-me-downs and even though it meant replenishing the supply of pants and shirts and shoes frequently as regular meals triggered growth spurts in both brothers.

Lukas said nothing about the cost.

Meals. Breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, a mid-afternoon snack, dinner, a bedtime snack. Sunday brunches at the Palmer House were replaced with picnics at the Point overlooking Lake Michigan, their second home.

Out with the anchovies in olive oil and smoked oysters and sushi and eggplant dip and artisan crackers and steak tartare and ceviche and imported anything, as long as it was bitter and rare and difficult to fathom. Out with anything “you will develop a taste for as you grow older”.

In with the simplest, kid-friendly foods of Dottie’s childhood. Chicken soup and chicken pot pie and grilled chicken sandwiches with sweet pickles on the side. Peanut butter and jam spread to the edges with the crusts cut off. Steamed peas and carrots with a dab of butter. Corn on the cob. Cheesy mashed potatoes. Watermelon. Simple green salads with cherry tomatoes and ranch dressing.

Grilled cheese and ham on sourdough. Roast beef on whole wheat. Pastrami and salami on rye. Sloppy Joes. Hot dogs, Chicago-style. Grilled burgers. Yes, and fries with ketchup and Butterfinger candy bars and pie. Bananas on a stick, frozen solid and dipped in chocolate, and frozen again. And the handful of ethnic dishes that most kids like: noodle pudding and blintzes with sweetened strawberries and brisket, slow cooked, made into sandwiches sloppy with gravy.

And macaroni and cheese, which Dean showed Dottie how to make and Sammy ate with pride.

Homemade lemonade and fresh squeezed orange juice. Chocolate and cherry phosphates, Green River soda and root beer. Ice cream bars and sundaes and sodas. Strawberry shortcake with whipped cream from a pressurized canister. Whipped cream that also could be weaponized by a sneaky younger brother.

Daily baths with endless supplies of soap and shampoo and hot water and bubbles, and early bedtimes snuggled in clean pajamas under soft, sweet-smelling bed linens.

Feeling safe, not because of salt lines and sigils or their father's guns, but because a caring adult was there to read stories at night and to wake them with waffles and soft scrambled eggs and chocolate milk.


	6. Summer School

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Best summer ever.

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.   _Robert Maynard Hutchins_

Dean began to relax. At first, he never left Sammy’s side. But, slowly, slowly, he realized that if he went with the Goldberg twins Nathan and Seth–two years his senior–and their dad (they lived upstairs) to a Chicago Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field, Sammy would be more than happy to stay home and spend the afternoon babysitting the Goldberg family’s goofy blond Cocker Spaniel, name of Rex.

In fact, it thrilled Sammy that he would be allowed to take Rex on a leash and walk by the lakefront with Dottie and bring the silly animal to play with the other dogs that congregated near one of several of the Jackson Park lagoons. People would comment on the pretty dog (its mother, Duchess, had been a champion and minor celebrity in the local dog show circles), and Sammy would tell them they could pet _his_ dog. And Dottie never corrected him.

Mr. Goldberg was a very nice man, good with kids. He had been born in the United States, but his wife was Russian, a chemist, who came to the States during one of several periods in the 1970s and 1980s when the Soviets seemed glad to get rid of their Jews. It had been an arranged marriage, but they astonished themselves by falling deeply in love.

They never asked Dean or Sam any questions about their past. Never asked about the curious people who visited Lukas, almost always carrying bulky and odd-shaped packages.

Mr. Goldberg, who repaired computers for a living, would take days off during the summer when his boys were home from school, just to spend time with them. Took them to ball games. Taught them to pitch, catch, and bat. Took them fishing for perch and coho salmon from the break walls and piers. Took them for overnight camping trips in Michigan. Soon, it was assumed Dean and Sam would be included.

The four boys were becoming fast friends, with Nathan and Seth easily falling into the roles of doting big brothers. They spoiled Sammy, and Dean, when he let them.

And, for the first time, Dean had older boys as friends,  who played with him instead of schooling him for war. Who admired him for being smart and for his athletic skills. And Sammy had friends who admired him for his athletic skills and being smart.

Relay races and games of tag and catch with Lukas’s grad students on the green, sloping Midway. Frisbee contests with the students’ dogs, Rex competing with the fast and smart Border collie and cattle dog mixes, which would retrieve as long as the boys were willing to play. The Spaniel would tire out first, snuggle next to Sam, soft and warm, and nap with his head in the boy’s lap.

And the Winchester boys laughing so hard every day that they would fall over on the thick green grass and kick their legs in the air and roll with the happy dogs. 

There were pick-up games of softball and tag with faculty and student body children from 30 countries as well as with kids from the neighborhood.

The older sibling were kind, looking after each other’s younger brothers and sisters. Everyone had a turn, and there were no helicopter parents to concern themselves about who won or lost. The rules were fluid, so when the little ones, like Sammy, came to bat, somehow, they always got on first base.

Everyone brought snacks from home and shared. Dean and Sam were considered rock stars because of Dottie’s muffins and cookie bars.

Someone’s father arranged for a bus and chaperones, and everyone went on a field trip to the Cracker Jack factory. Wow. Someone else’s mother took a busload of kids and parents to the Indiana sand dunes. Double wow.

Dottie was vacuuming sand out of her hand woven rugs for days. With a smile.

And weekly visits to museums–the boys had memorized the first floor layout of the Field Museum, and the guards knew the brothers on sight.  _The Museum of Science and Industry. The Aquarium. The Planetarium. The Lincoln Park Zoo._

The children they played with from New American families spoke broken American English that they learned from television shows and the Queen’s English that they learned on the cobbled streets of Oxford, plus dialects, pidgins, slang, and patois. Even when no one spoke the same language, everyone understood each other perfectly.

Everyone was different, so everyone was the same. Sam and Dean fit in with children whose parents were blessed with brains and talent in the Old World, so they had a ticket to the best life imaginable at a university and community that welcomed them, leaving the horrors of war and famine and a dozen dictators behind them. And with children whose parents had risked everything on a train ride from Mississippi and found a miraculous place where they heard old, white men called their young, black mothers “ma’am”, with respect.

So, if Dean slipped up and mentioned monsters, the children whose families had fled the headlines from whatever current crisis was brewing in Bosnia and Chile and Bangladesh and Red China and North Korea and Beirut and Liberia and Haiti and Mississippi, nodded their heads and said, we know, and there was no need to explain or apologize. Everyone would go back to learning the batting order for the next inning, and some adult would show you a better way to grip a baseball or football instead of holding a gun or throwing a knife.

\-----

The university ran the best K-12 school in the city and the best summer school in the city. The brothers spent two weeks with brilliant graduate students who lived for kids like Sammy and Dean. Some of the classes were taught by professors whose names were on the covers of the books on the shelves. Couldn’t have been nicer.

They studied astronomy and dinosaurs and the ecology of Lake Michigan. Took pottery classes with real pottery wheels. Dean wrote poetry and stapled together his own book of verse, printed on colored construction paper. Sammy learned folk songs from a half dozen countries.

The brothers listened to classical music and danced around the school' gymnasium like crazy people. Dottie helped chaperone their field trip to the Chicago Symphony, which was like going to the prettiest church in the world. The musicians were dressed in everyday clothes and made the instruments sound like ducks and cats, and there was a story about hunters. Sam and Dean watched and listened wide-eyed.

Dottie came to the school one day and taught finger-painting and watercolors, and stuff that Dean secretly thought was pretty cool with yarn and paint. Sammy told everyone who would listen, over and over, that she was “his” Aunt Dottie. She did not correct him.

By the end of their summer school session, the boys had built a model of the solar system and knew what a climax forest was and where to find the banks of ancient Lake Chicago and what an oboe sounded like.

Sammy was younger than most of the children in the class, because the two boys refused to be separated and he stayed with Dean and the older students. But the school catered to geniuses and took Sammy’s intelligence and Dean’s maturity in stride.

The teachers and counselors met with Dottie and told her what she already knew, that both boys were smart. Really really smart. Everyone had fallen in love with them, and given that she and her husband were members of the university community, if they were able to win formal guardianship of their nephews, it would mean free tuition for the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which would be like winning the Gold Ring, a chance to prepare for any kind of life they might want.

Both brothers were flourishing. Sam woke up as if each day was a Christmas present to unwrap. The simplest pleasures, like licking raw cookie dough from a spatula or having a heated soft towel, fresh from the dryer, to bundle in after a bath, delighted him. He took nothing for granted. Grateful, so good, so much fun to be around. Dottie would hug him and take deep breathes of his sweet little boy smell and never want to let him go.

And, day-by-day, Dottie could see Dean’s burdens slipping from his small shoulders. The word _carefree_ had a special meaning for her, as she watched Dean stuff his face with an ice cream sandwich and then hit a clean double and slide into second, grinning ear to ear. His biggest worry was if he was going to learn to pitch a curve ball by the end of summer.

The other boys and girls followed him around, listened to his advice, and made him their leader without his having to do anything but be himself.

Lukas and Dottie talked. Actually, Dottie talked. She did not ask Lukas, she told him that she was going to start the custody process, meaning find a source for forged papers (not so difficult in big-city Chicago), and the Lab School had jumpstarted the boys’ enrollment in the September semester. First and fourth grade, although everyone suspected both boys would be skipping grades.

Lukas just listened. Said nothing.

And then Mr. Winchester came back. And Dottie understood why Lukas has not bothered to argue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another autobiographical snippet. I dislike the Stupid Dean trope, so I like to make him smart.


	7. Back on the Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summer ends for Dottie Mitkus and the Winchester brothers.

Whoever has no house now will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone. _Reiner Maria Rilke_

Dottie and the brothers had been at the beach all afternoon, building sandcastles with the Goldberg twins and splashing in the lake water where it was waist-high.

The four boys were full of high spirits. Each was carrying an armful of beach paraphernalia. Little Sammy lugged a huge yellow and blue towel, folded and draped over his shoulder, and Dean had his arms wrapped around a wicker basket of sun tan lotion, empty food containers, and plastic shovels and buckets. The bigger Goldberg twins carried blankets and a cooler that had held ice and cold bottles of pop and juice.

Dottie was behind them, laughing at their heated conversation regarding their comic book heroes. Everyone was rosy from the sun. The troop entered the lobby of the co-op, and Nathan and Seth ran upstairs to the second floor to check in with their parents.

Mrs. Goldberg had invited them for dinner: fat kosher hot dogs and potato salad, Russian style, with cooked peas and carrots. Mr. Goldberg was going to fire up his little grill on their porch, which caught the lake breezes and provided a great view of Jackson Park and the boats on the lake.

Dottie gave Dean the key and let him open the front entryway to their co-op, and Dean and Sam pushed the heavy door with their shoulders, with Dottie helping (just a little bit). But suddenly, Sammy was sobbing with joy, dropping the towel and running to his father. Dean put down the basket and walked slowly behind, played the little man, trying not to cry. Both faces were lit up like lighthouse beacons, and their father was what they searching for.

The dour-faced Hunter looked stunned as he knelt and hugged his boys.

Sam and Dean had grown over the summer. They were taller, more substantial, cheeks and bodies filled in. Their faces and limbs were tan, and their hair was burnt into gold filaments. Three months of good meals and snacks, long walks in Jackson Park, hours on lakefront beaches, and endless play sessions on monkey bars, slides, and swings had built muscles.

And they were wearing nice clothes. Their hair was cut. And their sneakers were new. And fit them.

Mr. Winchester’s face changed. For a minute or so, he looked young and happy–the proud father. And then it shifted. He let go of the boys, stood up, and stepped back.

“Dean, help your brother pack,” he said. “We’re leaving in 30 minutes.”

He didn’t sound like a loving father. He sounded like an officer giving orders to untrustworthy troops.

Dottie looked for Lukas. Sammy and Dean were loyal soldiers, but they had said enough, particularly during the first weeks, that Dottie could construct an accurate picture of what life of the road was like and would they were returning to.

He was standing behind Mr. Winchester, shaking his head at her. He had known the whole time. Let her and the boys live their little dream, knowing nothing he could say could convince her that the hope she could keep the boys was futile.

She was helpless. Mr. Winchester might leave the boys with someone he trusted, like the notable Dr. Mitkus and his wife, but if the police or social services were involved, she knew without being told that he would flee or fight. Probably both.

The boys ran to the bedroom with Dottie close behind. Sammy stood and watched while Dean pulled open a drawer and pulled their old clothes, the ones that still fit, folded them and stuffed them into the battered duffel bag that had lain empty for weeks. Dottie realized what Dean was doing, and began to empty the contents of the closet and the big dresser onto the bed: socks, underwear, pajamas, shirts, jeans, and sweaters.

“These are yours,” she said. “Take what you can.”

From the bottom of the closet she pulled out a big canvas gym tote that once ferried her art supplies to and from classes. She stuffed Sam’s favorite books and Dean’s ball and glove inside and then filled it with towels, shampoo bottles, and soap bars from the linen closet in the green-tiled bathroom.

Sammy still was crying, but the rhythm had changed. He was no longer weeping with relief to see their father alive and well. He was crying because they were leaving. Dean was tight-lipped, eyes wet and red.

Their father had gone into the library with Lukas. The door was closed.

Dottie left the brothers and ran to the kitchen. Filled a cloth shopping bag with canned goods that she knew would keep. Slapped together some peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, and tucked each one into a plastic sandwich wrapper and placed them on top of the cans. And then put the dozen chocolate cupcakes she had baked for tomorrow’s baseball game into a paper sack on top, with a stack of red-checked picnic napkins.

The boys were waiting by the front door of the co-op, obedient and still in tears. Although they were a healthy version of the boys she had met months before, they had the same looks of resignation as did those pale, skinny boys huddled together on the couch.

Sammy clutched the handle of the canvas gym tote, which he had dragged from the bedroom, and Dean held on tight to the old duffel bag stuffed with clothing. She took the gym tote from Sammy, and with the shopping bag in hand, led the boys outside.

Mr. Winchester came striding out of the library with Lukas, glanced at the boys and kept moving, knowing they would follow. Then, through the front door, through the lobby of the co-op building and out into the late afternoon sun. The breeze from the lake had sprung up, and the air had begun to cool.

The Hunter walked swiftly around the corner of the building and disappeared. No one said anything. Dottie followed the boys to the street; Lukas took up the rear. A couple of minutes later a growling black Impala muscled its way to the curb in front of the co-op building, a bad boy amidst the goody-two-shoes Saabs and Volvos and Volkswagens favored by Hyde Parkers.

Suddenly, Dottie heard shouting. From the Goldbergs’ second-floor porch above their heads the twins were waving and yelling, and Rex, excited to see his best friend Sammy, had begun yipping. Sammy and Dean waved back hesitantly. Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg came out and stared wordlessly. They hugged their boys and shushed them. Even the silly dog stopped barking.

Dottie put the gym tote and the shopping bag filled with food next to the black car’s trunk and stepped back.

Mr. Winchester turned off the motor and squeezed out of the car. He took the duffel bag filled with clothes from Dean, opened up the Impala’s spacious trunk, and tossed the bag in. Slammed it shut with unnecessary force.

The Goldberg family, Dottie and Lukas, and the boys watched in silence. The only sounds were Sammy’s stifled sobs and the sympathetic whimpering of the spaniel Rex, who wanted to comfort his unhappy friend.

The tall Hunter then returned to the curb and hefted the unfamiliar canvas gym tote, zipped it open, and looked inside. He looked at Dottie and tossed the tote by the side of the car onto the well-worn strip of lawn next to the street. Dottie moved forward to confront him, but Lukas intercepted her with an arm around her waist. When he felt her relax, he let her go and moved away.

She fell to her knees, and both boys ran to her.. She was weeping, and they were comforting her. Dean put his arms around her and awkwardly patted her back.

And they left her. Dean carried the shopping bag and opened the back door of the car, and both boys climbed into the back seat, Sammy first, Dean carrying the shopping bag with the cupcakes, sandwiches, and canned goods. Dean pulled the door shut

Both boys waved from the back windows.

And they were gone, the throaty rumble of the Impala fading into the distance as the late summer afternoon light turned the air turned to gold.

Dottie picked up the canvas gym tote and walked inside with Lukas.

\-----

For the next few days, Lukas would find the dog Rex whining outside the door to their co-op. He would carry the spaniel back upstairs; the dog refused to walk on its own. The twins moped around until school started. Word spread among their friends and neighbors. Dean and Sam went home to Kansas and would not be returning. Lukas called the lab school office and cancelled enrollment.

Dottie and Lukas would not see the boys again for many years.


	8. Meet Lukas Mitkus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dottie receives a first-class tutorial in the Supernatural world.

_“But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?"_

_"You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.”_

_―_ _Dorothy L. Sayers,_ Gaudy Night

Dottie Mitkus reclaimed the master suite and took to her bed for a week. She was tired out from the boys, she said. Lukas stayed on the couch in the library.

Lukas brought her meals on trays. He was a decent cook, but she picked at the food. He would come back into the bedroom to pick up the dishes and trays, and her back would be turned to him. She didn’t bother to pretend to be asleep.

Dottie had been a very busy person for fourteen years, starting with her first day of college and, then four years later, continuing with her marriage to Lukas. The word she would have used was “Fulfilled”.

Now, lying in bed, with nothing to do but eat, sleep, dream, and grieve, certain truths were pushing their way up into her consciousness, which her heavy schedule of activities had masked.

That window in her mind was opening wider, and the storm outside was raging.

Details. She was an artist, after all.

The word she now would use was “Distracted”.

One morning, without fanfare, she left the bed. She showered, slipped into old sweats and a hoodie, and found her husband in the kitchen. Motioned him to follow her into their living room, where they sat apart on a rarely used love seat.

Dottie talked, and Lukas listened. An ultimatum. Then Lukas and Dottie made a dozen phone calls between them, and they packed. Dottie went upstairs to let the Goldbergs they were going away for a few days. Father Kaufmann showed up and helped carry their bags to the car.

They were on the road by noon. The trip was made to a sound track of book tapes and classical music. Lukas and Dottie were silent.

They drove north and west into Wisconsin, into a little artsy town near a lake, where a former university librarian owned a bed and breakfast–tiny cabins with giant beds and private patios.

She and Lukas took a week to figure things out, which can happen when smart people apply the same attention to their relationships as they do to fine-tuning the punctuation in formal papers to be read at international conferences or to buying a new car.

\-------

Lukas learned that his wife still loved him, which was a relief.

He learned he had lost his Faculty Wife forever, which was okay by him. He already had been granted tenure, and he was realizing that he was tired of the politicking and petty skirmishes for prestige and power. He had, as his mother would say, bigger fish to fry.

He also learned that there were no guarantees that he was going to have any kind of wife by the end of the week.

Dottie wanted the truth, starting with the Hunters, specifically John Winchester and his sons, and the library, specifically the creepy symbols that permeated their lives and that made her think that the Ghostbusters were going to show up some night.

Just to cover all bases, she launched her deposition with the question she learned from watching decades of police procedure television shows–her guilty pleasure:

What have you not told me?

\-----

In many ways, Lukas had been, up to that point, an old-fashioned, old-country husband, which meant that although he believed that he and his wife were a team, he felt he needed to bear the brunt of protecting her from the realities of his real work.

He thought that by putting the Supernatural world behind an unbreakable wall, feeding her innocent tidbits of information, and wrapping his work in the illusion that it was all make-believe he could protect her from the nightmares that plague most of the people who know that in this universe, the make-believe is real.

Lukas looked at the woman sitting next to him on a wooden bench overlooking the small Wisconsin lake, drinking a Leinenkugel from the bottle, hair cropped short, wrapped up in that ancient hoodie, her eyes dark and stormy, pale lips drawn in a thin, tight line, and wondered why he ever thought she needed to be protected from anything.

So, Truth. The monsters under the bed were real, and the hunters were not even remotely delusional.

Dottie didn’t blink.

Truth: And his Lithuanian family members had been Hunters for generations, or Catholic priests and nuns, or both.   
  
Truth: Remember the research we did for the grass snake drawing, Lukas asked? Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe, and the archaic Lithuanian language is considered to be the closest remaining language to the Proto-Indo-European, and Lithuanians are considered to be predisposed for the role of scholar-hunters, particularly if Lithuanian was their Mother Tongue. A useful tool for casting spells.

Truth: Lukas was more of a zoologist than someone who chased fairy tales.

Truth: He was a Hunter, too, and part of a network of supernatural Hunters that extended beyond American borders and beyond this life into Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and…well, maybe that was for another conversation.

At this point, their shared academic programming kicked into overdrive. Dottie went into town and bought dozens of packages of colored index cards and push pins. They used the rustic wood walls of the cabin as their study board.

Lukas spent a week going through a folksonomy of spirits, monsters, gods and godlings, Judeo-Christian Biblical truths and lies, Men and Women and Entities of Letters, Adepts, Talismen, Valkyries, Hunters, Witches and Warlocks, elementals, ghosts, true myths and false myths, and the power of salt, iron, silver, holy water, and holy oil. Warding symbols–that took two days. Spells and hex bags and curses and blessings. The Apocalypse. Leviathans. Demons, Angels.

Supernatural 101.

Dottie took notes in one of her artist sketchbooks. By the second day she was working on her first credible drawing of a Wendigo.

\-----

Historically, Hunters are lousy at relationships that last more than a night in a motel. Since Lukas came from an ancient Hunter family, with uncles and aunts and cousins always on the move, he knew at an early age what his life could be like. Some spouses and partners became Hunters as well; some were satisfied with a life of raising the children and living for the days and weeks that their Hunters would come home. But he felt that the half-life of a Hunter’s spouse was not a fate he would wish on anyone.

By the time Lukas was 14, when he had precociously finished high school, he had decided on the path of becoming a priest and already had chosen to pursue a life as a Jesuit. But, UC’s anthropology department was where he was going to learn what he needed to study and keep safe his family’s ancient collection of unholy books. His Jesuit mentors agreed.

So, while he hunted, he studied. After a couple of close calls, he decided that he needed to focus on his research, and, by that time, he had assumed the mantle of Keeper for the cursed library, a legacy that had been in his family for generations.

And then he saw Dottie that first day of her freshmen year. She was running down the Midway under a brilliant September sky, her long hair streaming behind her, in the clothes of a working artist–old jeans, blue work shirt rolled up above her elbows, work boots–actually dressed not so differently from the Hunters who came to his parent’s house, who slept in the big room over the garage, and who filled up on his mother’s life-giving mushroom-barley soup between cases.

She was not just beautiful; she was authentically, fully, humanly alive. It was love at first sight, as powerful as any Supernatural witchery. He prayed that she was not spoken for, that by some miracle, she was not in love with someone else.

He ran to intercept her, shouting at her to wait for him. She stopped, puzzled, squinting into the sun, wondering who he was and why he was yelling. She was not afraid. She thought that it was simply another part of the adventure of the fulfillment of a dream she had lived for since a third grade art teacher had told her that she had talent.

He spent the next four years figuring how he was going to marry her and keep her safe.

\-----

So many bells went off in her brain during that conversation with her husband when he first drew back the curtain on their lives that later she would say she thought she was sitting in the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel listening to the carillon on Christmas Eve.

The home office and library, it turned out, was sort of a prison for “bad books,” and that in the same way the brave FBI trainee in that movie would come to interview the evil prisoner in order to do good, Hunters would come to the co-op to read evil books, hoping to find clues in order to do good.

The money that afforded them a better lifestyle than the majority of single-income university couples enjoyed? Lukas said he did inherit the money, but it was meant to support protecting and maintaining the cursed library and to provide the staff and his family with what was in effect a salary with perks. Lukas hinted the funds came from his Hunter family with sizable donations from the Catholic Church, specifically the Society of Jesus, as administered by Loyola University.

Dottie realized that even the Vatican Library, home to many of the most dangerous texts on the planet, preferred that certain books be kept on the other side of the world.

And Father Kaufmann, she learned, was more than an archivist. More like a member of an elite Royal Guard, protecting his king and kingdom from harm.

\-----

The couple came home.

\-----

Dottie took back her birth name: Esther Sabin.

 -----

“Let’s get to work, she told her husband.


	9. The Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lukas gets wounded in the line of duty, and Esther figures out a way to protect thousands of innocent civilian families. And two old friends show up.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. _– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room._

“Sorry it took so long,” said Dean. “We were kinda busy.”

Esther was sobbing in his arms.

Five minutes before, he and Sam had pulled up in front of the co-op building, and the Impala’s distinctive growl had been like a clarion call to the middle-aged artist. She had raced out of the building, pausing as two handsome men, tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in Hunter flannel and canvas, squeezed out of the black muscle car.

She knew immediately that they were the Winchester brothers, now towering over her, but still in her heart they were her little boys.

“I've wanted to see you for so long,” she cried into Dean’s shoulder. Sam hovered and finally, could not wait. He gently plucked her from the circle of his brother’s arms, and she readily turned into his embrace. The tall man bent over the middle-aged woman as if he was a sheltering tree, protecting her from the world.

Lukas had followed Esther out of the co-op building, albeit slowed by a limp that required a cane. The nerves in his leg had never recovered from an encounter with some human monsters five years before.

Federal officers had cornered the last and worst of a band of hired thugs, well-armed protection for the brains behind an international sex trafficking ring. The bad guys had fled during a massive raid on their Heartland headquarters near Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

They had gone to ground, taking hostages in a grade school in rural Indiana. The Feds had the firepower, but they knew they needed more than an endless supply of ammo if the children and teachers were to make it out alive.

The world had evolved. The number of Hunters, Talismen, and Adepts that were members of the law enforcement community had reached a critical mass and the existence of the Supernatural was no longer a poorly guarded secret. Lukas had been recruited to ‘chant protections for the hostages while Hunters and FBI cast spells to bind the captors into submission without the need for a single shot.

Would have worked except for the fact that their demon bosses had warded the human thugs. The captors could no longer hurt the protected hostages–Lukas had played his part well–but they could swarm out of the building and engage the Feds and Hunters in an old-fashioned, Wild West shootout. And Lukas, who was defended against witchcraft, not machine guns, had woke up in a Gary, Indiana hospital with one of his legs chewed to hamburger by a spray of bullets.

Esther thought her husband’s black oak walking stick with the solid silver dragon cane head fashionable. And sexy. And the iron ball hidden in its tip made it a formidable weapon.

Lukas looked at the Hunters and his wife through his own veil of happy tears.

It had been 20 years. Of course, Esther and Lukas heard about the Winchester exploits (legends?). But even with the brothers’ frequent trips to Chicago, some monster of the week or multi-dimensional endgame involving Heaven and Hell took precedence over a face-to-face reunion. Or Esther and Lukas were on walkabout for months, meeting with Shamans and White Witches and Adepts and friendly creatures in fabled lands far from the Windy City.

During those trips Esther took the legacy of the Hunter’s Journal and raised the bar with her museum-quality drawings and meticulous notes. Earned the nickname of _Ms. Audobon;_ her work called to mind those explorers and scientists whose sketches were both accurate and works of art.

Adapted her sketches into award-winning fairy tale books for adults and children, toning them down a little. Well, more than a little. Readers loved The Lore series, and they bought the illustrated picture books by in the tens of thousands. Those were the ones with the beautiful full-color renditions of wards, inserted at the beginning of each chapter, printed on sturdy poster board and micro perforated. You could pop out the images and hang them in your window or on the wall. People made them into mobiles and hung them over cribs.

The monsters of the Supernatural world were not pleased.

\-----

The brothers moved into the Sabin-Mitkus co-op for a week. Esther and Lukas insisted they take the master suite with the big king bed and the awesome bathroom; she pulled quilts, their old favorites, from her workroom’ cedar chest. Fresh fluffy towels. A vase of fresh cut zinnias. Thought of the brothers when they first met, in their new pajamas, hair still wet from bubble baths in the green-tiled tub. More happy tears.

Served milk and apple muffins for their first snack.

She elbowed Dean aside in the tiny kitchen as they cooked together and laughed. Made favorites: pancakes and hamburgers and mac and cheese. Sam built Mediterranean -style salads with fresh mozzarella cheese and smoked tuna filets and Roma tomatoes that even Dean ate with relish. And there was ice cream. And pie.

Esther marveled that despite years of warfare and tragedy, she still could see those little boys: sweet Sammy and protective Dean.

What was different was that Esther was no longer locked out of discussions in the library, which Sam had nicknamed The Forbidden City. Father Kaufmann had become a friend and taught her the secrets of safely managing the books in the collection. She likened the lessons to poisonous snake-handling, as if the snakes were angry all the time. And hungry.

After that visit, even if the world was coming to an end, again, Sam and Dean made it a point to visit Esther and Lukas at least once a year. And when the brothers began exploring the riches left by the Men and Women of Letters, they realized that the Mitkus library was as safe as the Bunker, if not safer, for some of the books and artifacts Team Free Will found in its storerooms.

Lukas, Esther, and Father Kaufmann would make the trip to Lebanon to bring the most lethal volumes back with them to the library and its specially designed warding, items designated as too dangerous for regular transport by Hunter or Adept. For all their wisdom, the MWOL were somewhat arrogant and shortsighted regarding the potential of their deadly treasure trove, a fact that caused the good Father to tsk on more than one occasion.

Since the first reunion, Esther felt as a hole in her heart had been filled. She was at peace and happy with her new life with Lukas.


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time to say good-bye.

I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.  _Emma Goldman_

Let there be no room for you, even in hell. _Traditional Lithuanian curse_

Twenty-five years later

Esther’s mother Rose Sabin did not approve. Even though she was an agnostic, she still had the traditional Jew’s resistance to cremation. But, Esther’s friends, especially the quiet Polish? Czech? man with the blue eyes and angelic name, the one who spoke to her in her childhood’s Polish-tinged Yiddish perfectly, insisted that her daughter’s soul would find its way back to Heaven with no problem, along with that of her husband. Even if their bodies were reduced to ash.

“I imagine Lukas and Esther have been welcomed above by an honor guard of Angels, thanking them for the work on Earth, and welcoming them to their eternity of reward in Heaven,” said Dr. Castiel Novak, who introduced himself at the campus memorial service as a professor of linguistics and good friend to her daughter and son-in-law.

Rose was not sentimental at a feisty 95.

“I may be old, but I am not a fool. And I am not convinced that my daughter’s spending much of her life as a glorified librarian and illustrator of childish books about monsters and heroes would be worthy of the attention of God’s Angels.”

Castiel looked mildly horrified, as if Rose had blasphemed. He reminded himself that the old woman soon enough would learn the truth of his words. He had not meant to comfort her, but simply to state the facts as he knew them firsthand.

He had been one of those officiating Angels that had welcomed Esther and Lukas.

\-----

The demons who showed up to take Esther hostage through physical means alone–no magic to ward against-intended to use her as a bargaining chip with Lukas for access to the cursed library. They had ambushed her as she strolled back from the grocery store with ice cream for dinner, just before she reached the door of the co-op building, which Lukas had bought outright years before.

The creatures were not prepared for a gray-haired, arthritic Talismen to fight so well or for her austere, scholarly husband, who rushed to her aid, to know so much about applied (versus theoretical) demonology, martial arts, and weaponry. The cane, it turned out, was a lethal weapon, particularly when the silver dragon head appeared to come to life.

But the couple was not prepared for the speed or size of the onslaught, and their linked souls fled, reluctantly. The Hunters and priests who came to their rescue were too late to save them, although they did protect the library while wiping out the sorry existence of a battalion of hell spawn, releasing their spirits to The Empty.

The official explanation was a jumble of police double-talk of gangs and cartels, with the two scholars as collateral damage.

There was a joint public memorial service at Rockefeller Chapel for the couple, attended by three generations of former students and colleagues from around the globe.

There also was a modest, private service for Rose and a few members of Lukas’s family. It was held by the lakefront at the couple’s favorite picnic spot for the benefit of Rose, who never learned the truth regarding her daughter and son-in-law’s true calling. Four generations of Goldbergs showed up, babies in arms, and the latest iteration of silly Rex the Cocker Spaniel, which pleased Sam no end.

Rose did not know that the urns were empty.

Then there was the wake at Lukas and Esther’s favorite restaurant, a Romanian eatery on Chicago’s North Side. The psychic force of the amount of garlic that had soaked into the walls over a century was, according to Castiel, like being hit in the face during a vigorous pillow fight, if you were a supernatural being, and like being immersed in a bath of cleansing Grace, if you were human. The attendees washed down garlicky sausages with wine spritzers, with Esther’s favorite cherry strudel for dessert. And straight shots of Becherovka, the favorite liqueur of the Sabin-Mitkus household.

And, finally, the true Hunter’s funeral, overseen by the Winchester brothers on a piece of land in remote, rural Michigan. Another private service, attended by an ancient Father Kaufmann, and a select group of Hunters, Talismen, Adepts, Jesuits, and Angels, including Castiel.

Everyone who attended knew what to do without direction. The bodies were cleansed and wrapped, placed on the pyre, and the woodpile was lit. Although they all knew the souls were safe in Heaven, there were still tears for the departed.  
  
Usually, a Hunter’s funeral is not a place or time for speeches, just silent contemplation and some serious drinking. But Dean stepped forward.  
  
“Esther and Lukas taught me that life could be good, at a time in my life when I thought it was only about duty and hardship. Hell, Sammy and I were just kids. Dad did his best…but he had lost his way when it came to raising children. I think…I think that pretty much every time we were faced with the worst, these past decades, it was our connection with love and humanity that saved us. Let Sammy overpower Lucifer when he jumped in the Cage. Let me convince Amara and Chuck to reconcile. And it was more than memories, not just about specific thoughts, it was the feelings that soaked into our bones for those three months. Esther pretended to be our mother, and we pretended to be her children, and by the end of the summer none of us were pretending any more.  
  
Here’s to Esther and Lukas, who saved the world more times than any of us will ever know."   
  
Sammy stood besides Dean, put his arm around his shoulders, and smiled.  
  
“What my brother said,” and engulfed him in a patented Sam Winchester hug.  
  
###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a timestamp to add about the building of the library and some of Dottie/Esther's first inklings that her husband was more than a mild-mannered professor.
> 
> By the way, there was a real Cocker Spaniel named Rex, son of Duchess. Gorgeous and goofy. Loved walks in Jackson Park. Once ate a Thanksgiving dinner all by himself while his family was distracted by that novelty called television. They got him to the vet in time.
> 
> The real Rose lived to 99.


	11. Timestamp: The Library

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before Esther and Lukas were married, Lukas built the library.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the real world, I work with libraries and librarians, and have visited some of the best.
> 
> I love the craft of magic, and this is pure fun for me, imaging how you will build a room to house the most dangerous books in the world.

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. _Saul Bellow_

Lukas’ office at the University of Chicago anthropology department was where he met with students, kept copies of textbooks and standard references, and stored the bureaucratic paperwork reflecting his steady climb up the career ladder, already a few steps away from department chair. His bookcases were orderly, filled with copies of well-thumbed and annotated classics, and the walls were covered with art from twenty dead civilizations.

In a place of honor was Dottie’s simple pen-and-ink drawing of a grass snake, worthy of a Renaissance-era master, which he had formally commissioned when she was still a junior. Their first joint project, pouring over books of Lithuanian lore together, with Lukas translating in his pleasant tenor voice as she made notes and asked questions, desperate to make it perfect.

But the official department office was not enough. Months before the wedding, he was discussing with Dottie his need for a formal library for his private collection of a few special books.

\-----

The co-op was the seventh property they checked out. Dottie was dismayed that Lukas wanted to buy into such a large place. Five bedrooms and three bathrooms– really? And it was old-fashioned, with high ceilings, large windows, and ornate golden oak woodwork, carved with what looked at first glance to be Celtic knots and the ubiquitous William Morris motifs of vine and cross. She had thought they would end up with a trendy loft with gallery-sized brick walls and skylights.

But Lukas had an inheritance, or so he said, and he convinced her it would be a good investment. He sold her on the capacious closets and the south light in her own workroom. It was huge, with more than enough room to store the tools of her artist trade, which included bolts of fabrics, skeins of spun wool, cotton, silk, and linen, and a cornucopia of paints, dyes, and inks. It also was big enough to hold her oversized drafting table, a workbench, storage chests, and her portable loom.

The massive bathroom with the 1920s green tile and oversized bathtub off the master bedroom clinched the deal.

Lukas mentioned during one of the several interviews where he and Dottie needed to win over to the cooperative’s board his idea for a “small office and library” remodel. The board members wisely demanded he submit a written plan and hire a structural engineer to evaluate the project. Having worked with scholars before, they knew “small office and library” could mean anything from a bookshelf to something the size of a circulating branch of the Chicago Public Library.

Lukas was not concerned. It turned out that the old coop building had been designed by a famous Chicago architect. (Aren’t they all?) It had been built with floors and walls reinforced with steel, and it passed inspection for anything up to and including the manufacture of commercial aircraft, a fact that Lukas had scoped out months before they placed earnest money on the co-op. Actually, months before he proposed to Dottie, a fact he never shared with his bride-to-be, until almost fifteen years later.

\------

Lukas had banked unused vacation time from the university so he could oversee the office and library remodeling. Dottie was neck-deep in her senior project, a massive multi-media opus that involved all of her skills as an artist and craftswoman. However, she stopped by at least twice a week, supervising the painters and moving in, piece by piece, her art and personal possessions from their shared apartment and from was left at home with her mother. She also was managing the buying and delivery of furniture for the rest of the apartment.

Lukas was very generous in terms of their home budget. She wondered how big that mysterious inheritance was, but when she asked her husband, he was vague. Something about a family trust.

The construction of the library took on the gravitas of the erection of a small cathedral. First, Lukas hired contractors to remove the wall between two of the large, spare bedrooms, leaving a space three times as big as his office at the university.

The sources of the lighting and electricity were mysteries. To the best of Dottie’s knowledge, an electrician was never hired. But, when she walked through the empty room, the ten-foot high ceilings glowed with a soft, cool light from behind translucent panels. Her expert gardener eye could see the color was full spectrum. When she asked her husband, he was vague, as usual, which whetted her artist curiosity even more.

One day, while the room was still empty and Lukas was running errands, Dottie dragged in a tall wooden ladder and climbed up, flashlight and long-necked screwdriver in hand, an old linen towel draped over her shoulder. She intended to push the panels out of their holders and examine the lighting system on her own.

On closer inspection, the panels looked more like they were crafted from organic material such as mother of pearl or horn, rather than glass or any manmade substance she had studied in her classes on architecture and sculpture. She thought of Captain Nemo and his glorious submarine the _Nautilus,_ then fantasized bioluminescence. More likely, she mused, the previous tenant was a university genius who had installed their own, one-of-a-kind system, which Lukas switched on during the first stage of construction.

But, as Dottie fearlessly climbed up the slightly swaying ladder, faint images appeared on the softly glowing panel directly above her. She perched on the top rung, balancing like a circus acrobat, only a few inches from the ceiling. She could make out a complex seven-pointed star surrounded by images that looked similar to the ideographs for the zodiac she had seen in some of Lukas’ books and on the walls of his office. She guessed these had been carved with a sharp blade, like a surgical scalpel. The cuts were made perpendicular to the floor, and apparently visible only from a short distance. She assumed that the same images were engraved on the other panels as well.

Dottie was trained to deal with fragile artifacts, and she had a healthy respect for antique wiring in old buildings. She touched the panel with the business end of the screwdriver. No sparking. She wrapped the handle with the towel and pushed against the panel on a corner. Solid. No cracking or splintering, but she did not want to stress the panel any more than she had to. She turned on the flashlight and held it as close as she could to the surface of the panel without touching it. Nothing reflected from the other side, and no hidden shapes were illuminated.

\-----

Amish furniture makers arrived from Ohio. Dottie was there when local union carpenters of Irish and Italian descent showed up to intercept the bearded invaders. There was a private meeting between the leaders of the two factions, including Lukas presiding as a mediator. Dottie, not ignorant of the potential rough-and-tumble of what Chicagoans called negotiation, would have been surprised at the behavior of all parties. The locals, good Catholics, listened quietly, read the documents in Latin that Lukas showed them, and left without a single protest, never to return.

The Amish were devout men who would pray before and after each day’s work. Relying on dovetail joinery, they paneled three walls of the room with formal bookshelves, which stretched to the ceiling. Without glue or nail, they cut and shaped planks of English oak with hand tools, then added waist-high stand-alone cabinets. The hinges and locks for the doors on the shelves were iron, imported from England, embossed with raised symbols culled from a dozen cultures. Some of them looked liked the images from the ceiling panels. Dottie observed that every door on every shelf had a locking mechanism.

Extra bars were added to the windows, as well as thick, wide wooden blinds, also made of oak, reinforced with thin strips of decorative iron.

Once the library shelves and doors had been built, an older workman arrived, silver-bearded and bald, short and muscular, with a set of high-end woodworking tools, the kind Dottie's sculptor friends would use. He looked a little like a 19th century lithograph of the god Vulcan working at his smithy. Took him two weeks to carve dozens of symbols into the edges of the shelves, including a smaller version of Dottie’s snake repeated on each panel and doorframe, as well as on the ends of cabinets. He never made a drawing. Never used tracing paper or stencils. Every image was carved freehand. He never hesitated, and he never made a mistake.

He played Bach cantatas the entire time on his high-end laptop, soaking the wood in holy resonance.

(Over the years Dottie began to recognize patterns and categories that seemed to transcend country, culture, and era. Stars, crosses, and hieroglyphs. Kanji ideograms, pictograms, and Paleo Hebrew. The Zodiac figures, Phoenician script, cave art, and symbols of worship, placation, and sacrifice. Alphabets from extinct civilizations. Images that were both primitive and elegant, ones she recognized from the hundreds of artifacts she had handled and the thousands of images she had inspected over years of formal art history classes and visits to museums throughout the Midwest and both coasts.)

From New York State came the glass for the bookcase doors and for the library’s windows. It was a measure of the skills of the Amish woodworkers and the New York glassmakers that the intricately etched pieces of glass fit perfectly into the wooden doorframes, which looked like they were designed to protect the shelving from more than dust. Dottie noticed that the same exact fit was true for the iron fixtures from England.

Dottie recognized the glass. It was conservation grade, used by museums and collectors to protect fine artifacts, but thicker than usual. The big sheets of glass for the library’s outer windows were tinged green. The surface rippled and bulged at the edges, as if the panes had been hand blown and found hanging in an ancient building for centuries.

The men who came to install the glass were four Orthodox Jews. They looked like first cousins to the Amish carpenters. They also prayed before and after each shift. Dottie noted that the symbols on the glass were identical to those on the wood and the ceiling panels. Every 13th pane contained her an etching of her snake.

It was not until the bookcases were completed, wiped down inside and out with the freshest of walnut oil, that dozens of boxes of ancient boxes and manuscripts came out of storage, filled with what turned out to be hundreds of books. (Score one for the co-op board, which anticipated the scope of the remodeling project. Nonetheless, they were now slightly cowed by Lukas’ apparent wealth. Who knew that University of Chicago professors were paid so well? Or that Lithuanians had trust funds?)

Another surprise for Dottie, who did not know that the storage unit or the books existed.

Serious-looking men and women, wearing clerical garb or its equivalent, driving white, anonymous vans, delivered the first big wave of boxes. Every scrap of packing material was cleaned up and carted off. More boxes arrived, and more books were unpacked and shelved, more than could have possibly fit in the shelves available. And, yet they did fit, with room to spare.

A desk, worktable, and chairs, all constructed of golden oak in classic Arts and Crafts Mission style, showed up, as did a couch that could fold out as a bed. Dottie did not understand. She had the gift of being able to measure the length of a strand of hand-carded wool, count the number of pieces of paper in a stack, or know the dimensions of a building, all with a glance. But when she entered the library, the walls seem to recede into the distance, unknowable.

A trick of the lighting, said Lukas.

Over several weeks, private couriers, often dressed as if they stepped out of a National Geographic special about Religions of the World, would bring books, papers, and scrolls. During those deliveries, the door of the library would be locked for several hours. More often than not than the couriers left ashen-faced and exhausted.

When the library was finished, days before the wedding and Dottie and Lukas’ moving in, the room housed hundreds of books, shelved floor to ceiling, and in the shorter floor cabinets, all cataloged under Lukas’ own system. The Library of Congress Classification system did not cut it. Every shelf was locked under glass, iron, and oak. Every surface was etched and carved with symbols, which Dottie learned were called sigils and wards. She thought about the images on the ceiling panels, but said nothing.

Despite the more than 8.5 million volumes the University of Chicago’s owned, there was no duplication between Lukas’ collection and what could be found in the university’ iconic libraries.

It was a small point of contention–his only rough spot in his relationship with the administration–that his personal books were not part of the larger library. Even the catalog of titles and authors could be known, one volume at a time, only by going through him in person. And the books would never left the room.

What did Dottie know?

Dottie knew nothing...except that the books were very fragile and very rare, And if Lukas or Father Kaufmann, the librarian, were not home or in the library, the door was locked. And Dottie did not have a key. And her husband had spent a fortune to house them in their new, palatial co-op. And he personally knew more strange people than was first apparent from his Clark Kent demeanor.

Between finishing her senior project, attending her classmates’ shows, graduating, planning the wedding, moving out of Lukas’ apartment, moving the final loads of stored possessions from her childhood home and dealing with her mother’s angst, Dottie had felt totally overwhelmed and distracted for months. But her pesky eye for detail and her artist’s curiosity gnawed at her.

So, just before the wedding, they had the Talk About Secrets. Which came down to Dottie asking the love of her life, “What the hell is going on?”

And Lukas seemed to know exactly what to say.

Lukas apologized under the general heading of not wanting to bother her during this crazy year. He did not tell her about the books because he did not think she would care all that much. The books were not really his, but belonged to the family trust, and he was their caretaker, along with faculty at Loyola University and staff from the Oriental Institute. The family trust was set up protect the centuries-old legacy of the rare books and to support the caretaker and the caretaker’s family, which is why they had the funds to buy the apartment and pay for the workers.

The images were pulled from standard scholarly texts; the trust requested a certain percentage of the funds be used for integrating art into the design, sort of like requiring local government and business to spend money on landscaping and paintings.

The workers were well-known in the archivist and museum communities. They all maintained web sites, if Dottie wanted more information.

The lighting system was designed when the building was first constructed. It was just greenhouse lighting, using experimental long-life bulbs, accessible through the crawl spaces above.

So sorry, Lukas said. I should have told you sooner. Wanted the money to be a surprise. The trust is generous.

Dottie cried, laughed, and they kissed. She punched Lukas in the shoulder, feeling the strong muscles underneath the obligatory tweed jacket. Talk to me next time, she said. And for the next ten years, she enjoyed a rich, full life. Even though a certain part of her artist’s critical brain slumbered, she was unconsciously filing away troublesome clues.

Every thing Lukas said was the truth, and yet, he lied, by avoiding bigger truths. He did so with a clear conscience. He made the choice to love Dottie, so he felt obligated to protect her: to protect her life, and more importantly, to protect her soul.

\-----

Father Kaufmann showed up a week after they returned from their honeymoon. He was a Jesuit from Loyola, broad-shoulder with bright blue eyes and sandy hair. He looked more like a Texas college football star turned Division I-A coach than a man of the cloth. As is typical of the order, he was a lexicographer, in addition to being a degreed librarian.

He came and went three days a week, silent and respectful, his salary paid for by his university. He had a key to the co-op. He also had the combination to the safe and codes for the self-destruct button, which could obliterate the entire collection in minutes without burning down the building. Dottie would not know about the safe or the button for years.

As a matter of record, Father Kaufmann was not happy with the marriage. He would not change his mind for years.

 


	12. Timestamp: The Faculty Wife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What was Dottie's life like before she discovered the truth behind her husband, the library, and the Hunters? A glimpse of what she gave up.

If I get married, I want to be very married.  _Audrey Hepburn_

Her University of Chicago friends were disappointed. Esther Sabin was a favorite in their clique of the acknowledged better artists in the Department of Visual Arts–a lovely woman with talent and charisma­. But, Esther-soon-to-be-Dottie, starry-eyed, told her friends that she wanted to use her skills for something more than stenciling silk for the curtains of Gold Coast widows.

The heart wants what the heart wants, said the inexperienced romantics regarding her extremely attractive older fiancé. He has you under a spell, mesmerizing you with the promises of prestige and financial security, said the pragmatists, which is to say the cynics, which is to say the envious.

In private, friend and foe whispered and sneered the most cutting of insults: _Handmaiden._ (It happened to men as well.) At a university where wicked smart and accomplished women had been a given since its founding, some abdicated their potential to serve another’s success.

Regardless, the department hosted a bridal shower with pragmatic gifts and an ironic spread of retro delicacies, like fluorescent gelatin salads and bologna sandwiches on white bread with iceberg lettuce and mayo. Everyone came, applauded Esther, and felt the obligatory tug at their hearts for the new couple.

\-----

Dottie shopped, made their meals, paid the bills, took care of the household with the help of a maid service, and handled her busy husband’s personal affairs and online calendar in tandem with the anthropology departments’ management staff. She kept his clothing in good order and ran personal errands. At least once each month, he was on the road to conferences and scholarly meetings, so she packed his bags and coordinated his travel schedule with the university. Sometimes she joined him; sometimes he traveled alone.

But the duties of a Faculty Wife are more than those of a Domestic Engineer.

Dottie would bring exotic ethnic dishes to potluck meals for the department’s open houses and graciously share recipes and sources for trendy ingredients, handwritten in lovely script on watermarked, laid paper. Her eye for color and style transformed dinner parties into events that, on their own, were the deciding factor for the successful poaching of top names from the Eastern  _Ivies._

She would drop off seasonal bouquets with which faculty members decorated their offices, worked with curators to make sure that artifacts were displayed to best effect, created one-of-a-kind gifts of potted herbs, salad dressings, and tisanes for any occasion, and fed platoons of graduate students with her famous no-gluten macaroons and Mexican-style cocoa, jacked with cinnamon, cloves, and her secret blend of chili powder.

She was a cheerful volunteer, at the ready to lend a hand with the grunt work of academe. She served on committees, where she was considered a voice of creativity and reason, staffed booths during freshman orientation, and took her turn escorting prospective students and families through the UC’s beautiful, lakefront campus. She could recite by heart the history of the university including Robert Maynard Hutchins’ biography, complete with amusing anecdotes.

_(When God looks down on Earth and sees a beggar, God sighs and says, “There but for the Grace of Robert Maynard Hutchins goes I.”)_

She listened without judgment or comment to institutional gossip, adopting a manner that conveyed her husband’s innate fair-mindedness and neutrality, bolstering his reputation as an effective and honest administrator.

\-----

Dottie developed a slightly eccentric personal style that veered towards Artful Bohemian rather than matronly Academic Frump. Her long, glossy seal-brown hair was kissed with dark gold highlights. Lukas loved how it shone in candlelight. She transformed it every morning into a thick French braid, worn up or down, formal or informal, depending on the events of the day. She wove high-end metallic yarn and imported ribbons into the strands, her trademark artisan touch.

She favored soft, fitted blouses with a touch of embroidery, ivory-on-ivory. The obligatory peasant skirts were accented with woven belts, but stopped above the knee, showing off shapely legs. She paired them with signature black raw silk jackets (she owned five) and a shifting collection of pins and necklaces she designed and assembled from glass beads from around the world.

Dottie’s took 30 minutes to apply her make-up each morning, drawing attention to her flawless skin, mobile mouth, and large, dark, almond-shaped eyes. She had learned to pay Rapt Attention to Important People who came to the university to present papers on obscure topics They tended to remember her, sitting next to her doting husband and holding hands in the front row of lecture halls and auditoriums.

University life became her canvas, her raw clay, her empty loom, for her to make beautiful. Her purpose was the political scaffolding for Lukas’ career’s success. She loved him, he treated her like a queen, and her life was complete.  
  
Until it wasn't.

**Author's Note:**

> The character of Rose Sabin is based on my mother and grandmother, may they rest in peace.
> 
> Everything I know about Lithuanians I learned from my former Lithuanian roommate and her family.


End file.
